The Atlantic Sounds network aims for a better understanding of music in Atlantic World encounters. It represents a largely unexplored interdisciplinary area, situated around ethnomusicology, popular musicology, maritime history and urban history. This major international conference is the final event of the AHRC-funded phase of the network and builds on three specialised colloquia in 2013. We welcome submissions from speakers who participated in previous events.

Popular music creates worlds around its listeners, temporary, often intimate, and feelingful environments within which the act of listening occurs. It meanwhile plays significant roles in the global flows of capitalism, politics, tourism and migration, and inflects the virtual spaces opened up online by digital technology. New research work, of all approaches, is welcome; those proposing papers should make clear how their presentation will shed new light on the relationships that emerge between types or instances of popular music and their most salient surrounding contexts, for instance, along the lines of one of the following questions:

The IASPM UK/Ireland Postgraduate Conference entitled ‘The Cultural Value of Popular Music’ was held at The University of Glasgow on the 5th – 6th September, 2013. A blog has been created documenting the event and featuring abstracts from the papers that were given. You can find it here: http://iaspmpg.blogspot.co.uk.

Leeds College of Music is pleased to present the launch of the International Festival for Artistic Innovation (IFAI) that will take place on 10-14 March 2014. IFAI will act as an umbrella to embrace a diverse range of music making and practice-led research. Established annual events, the International Festival for Innovations in Music Production & Composition (iFIMPaC) and the Leeds International Jazz Education Conference (LIJEC), will form part of the Festival along with developments dedicated to contemporary classical and popular musics.

Over the past two decades, digital technologies have fundamentally altered the ways that musical and audiovisual media are created, circulated and received. As musical and audiovisual content has been made available in multiple formats through a variety of media platforms, there has been a multifaceted convergence of visual and sonic media, of production and consumption, and of corporate and grassroots artistic endeavours. Creators, promoters and audiences have responded in a variety of ways to the new challenges and opportunities. And, at the same times as media industries’ adaptive strategies are shifting users’ expectations and experience of audio-visual content, participatory use is constantly stretching and testing the legal frameworks of copyright law.